Netflix will cancel your subscription if you haven’t watched anything in the past year

According to a post yesterday on the Netflix blog, customers who haven’t used Netflix in the past year will be prompted to confirm that they wish to keep their subscriptions. If a customer doesn’t respond, Netflix will automatically cancel their inactive subscription.

We’re asking everyone who has not watched anything on Netflix for a year since they joined to confirm they want to keep their membership. And we’ll do the same for anyone who has stopped watching for more than two years.

You can expect to start seeing these emails or in-app notifications this week.

If they don’t confirm that they want to keep subscribing, we’ll automatically cancel their subscription. If anyone changes their mind later, it’s really easy to restart Netflix.

But won’t cancelling the subscription delete your watch history and more?

We’ve always thought it should be easy to sign up and to cancel. So, as always, anyone who cancels their account and then rejoins within 10 months will still have their favorites, profiles, viewing preferences and account details just as they left them.

Netflix is hoping that the new rules “save people some hard earned cash.” CNBC wrote that the move shows “a measure of confidence in Netflix’s value proposition for customers.”

The company saw a major surge in subscribers during the past quarter, having added sixteen million new subscribers at the end of the quarter due to shelter-in-place directive amid the coronavirus pandemic that has kept many at home.

As noted by The Loop’s Shawn King, this is also a great PR move because, according to Netflix itself, inactive accounts represent “less than half of one percent of our overall member base, only a few hundred thousand, and are already factored into our financial guidance.”

As a result, this unusual move should not affect Netflix’s bottom line by much. As a bonus, “they get a nice ‘we’re the good guys!’ bump out of it,” as Shawn himself observed.